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Apple's School Days are Numbered
prostoalex writes "Business Week describes the current situation in the educational market, suggesting that Apple will lose its share among the high school teachers and students. The worst enemies, according to Business Week, are school superintendents. "We want a single platform," one of them said. "We're trying to get there using the carrot, or blackmail, or rewards, or whatever you call it.""
An Apple for the teacher? Not anymore! Now they get oranges and bananas.
For a long time I've been predicting they would move away from Apple.
It just doesn't make logical sense to use Apple to educate kids for a Wintel world.
The unofficial
If your kids can't figure out how to use a different operating system because its widgets are on the right side of the window, then they're pretty fucking stupid.
Of course that money they saved will be spent on removing the first worm or two.
Nah, they'll be too busy fighting over who gets to use the VAXen.
Where to start. The 800 MHz G4 is faster than a 2GHz AMD processor. In certain tests it even beats a 4GHz Pentium4 (hence the name: G4). The Mac also has superior software which uses the 128MB much more efficiently than a Windows PC would. The memory efficiency is about 1:5, so you'd have to have more than 512MB in your Windows PC to keep up. The same goes for the harddisk: have you seen how well Quicktime compresses media data? Makes the 40GB harddisk look like infinite storage. And don't get me started on monitor sizes. The horrible Windows interface wastes screen real estate it's not even funny anymore. Two inch is about as much screen space as the Windows taskbar alone wastes compared to the sexy MacOSX dock. Really, get your facts together before you start comparing prices. It's not just about raw numbers, efficiency matters.
A fair percentage (like most of them) don't even know you can do little things like that. And if you really really want to be nasty... drag the top edge of the task bar so as to turn it into one that's only a few pixels thick as well...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
This individual's Mac Zealot authorization has been revoked. We sincerely apologize for the nonsensical gibberish he/she has spouted. Please rest assured that we have never and will never tolerate exaggerated claims such as these.
Thank you,
Friends of Steve
What school is this?
*concocts a plan to get failing students to help fund a G5 tower purchase*
They ditched their working mainframe software that handled billing and scheduling for an NT based system. I'll be kind, there were problems. No fuck that, the system was braindead. By 2000 the system was still screwing things up.
At some point in this giant clown circus one of their computer systems sent back one of my federal loans. A $6000 balance balooned to $10,000. After spending 2 years camped out at the billing office to straighten the matter out, I still couldn't enroll for non-payment, nor get a loan because I wasn't enrolled. I finally had to take a personal loan, which I needed to start paying back immediately, at which point I said fsck it and got a real job.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Virus-vulnerable monoculture network!". "It's really quite simple you see, there is no other way to guarantee that the virus of the week, coded by some filipino script kiddy, can shutdown every single computer on our network" says J.D. Umbass, superintendent of Jefferson County School System, Pennsylvania. "Besides, if kids every growing up having an alternative perspective on computer technology, they may accidentally understand it." "And it can't be overstated, just how much we save yearly, by being able to hire idiots that only know how to say 'Reboot the computer and see if that fixes your problem'", J.D. Umbass.
"Most important to remember though, is that we don't really teach the children anything other than how to be the secretary or register monkeys of tomorrow, earning minimum wage, and never quite enough to own the likes of the beautiful machines in our computer lab. So what does it matter, if they only get to experience the most ill-designed OS ever concieved, that's what Microsoft is extorting every PC and POS manufacturer into using." said J.D. Umbass.
On a Mac, I have:
In fact, I would go so far as to say that the Mac is the most-compatible platform out there. Personally, I have six different OSs on my Mac right now (Mac OS X, Mac OS 9.1, 9.2.2, Mandrake Linux, Win98 SE and PC-DOS). And that's not even breaking a sweat.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein